An Accidental Programmer Exploring 19thC Literature

Exploring texts as networks allows connections within and between texts to be visualised in a simplified manner, enabling researchers to gain insight into complex relationships, which may otherwise remain hidden. Network analysis of texts is at the intersection of the humanities and science, and therefore has the potential to be truly interdisciplinary. This annotated bibliography …

In the second week of the Coursera R Programming course and things were getting decidedly tough with the focus being on creating functions. The shift from basic calculations to writing functions is a very steep learning curve. I had made the mistake of reading a ‘warning’ post which highlighted the difficulties of creating the assignment …

My initial foray into the world of programming seemed to go fairly well, at least, I managed to get my head around the basics and haven’t run screaming from my laptop. There were a few areas which I found more tricky than others, but I think that some of that is because I don’t have a maths …

As I have been delving deeper into the technicalities of a corpus-based approach to literature, it has become increasingly evident that I will need to get my head around some fairly complex statistical analysis. The more I read about this type of analysis, the more references to R I found. To be able to fully …

As Armistice Day approaches, I thought I would write a post about my own experience of digital history and why I feel that digitisation projects are so important. It is 100 years since the start of World War 1, there are no longer any living combatants. As the years pass, there it is increasingly likely that we …

Why use network models? An area of data visualisation, which I have been exploring in another online course (Social Network Analysis from the University of Michigan, via Coursera), are network models. Network models are designed to simplify complex networks in a manner which allows the reader to view patterns and relationships which may be hidden in a mass …

The battle lines are drawn, in one corner we have Stanley Fish, the “saving remnant” who “insists on the distinction between the true and the false”, and in the other Franco Moretti, who carries out research “without a single direct textual reading” and doesn’t care if his idea is “particularly popular” (48). Two extremes, dividing …

Data can be beautiful. The tools we have at our disposal mean that we can visualise and explore data in ways that simply were not possible a decade ago. Hans Rosling, the Swedish statistician who founded Gapminder, demonstrates some of the possibilities in this video: Visualising Data The Gapminder world statistics cover a huge range …

Crowdsourcing The term ‘crowdsourcing’ was first used by Jeff Howe in a Wired Magazine article, the word itself a portmanteau of outsourcing and crowd. Initially, the term focused on the business world and had connotations of profit, outsourcing jobs and cheap labour. The term has been increasingly repurposed by cultural heritage and citizen science, …

The intention behind this post, besides getting past the ominous blank page, is to synthesise my understanding of digital humanities based on the first week readings and lecture for AFF601 ‘Digital Humanities: Theory and Practice’. Day of DH One of my first forays into the world of Digital Humanities was taking part in Day of …